Oh, look, a space to write, a space to put music in, and a space to draw things.

I'm garbage at all three.

Expect nothing great.

I'm working on a bit of a story in my free time. It may or may not have ties to something I want to do somewhere down the line.

---

A rattling woke Shula from her sleep. Her world tilted wildly, and instinctively her hands clung to the wooden frame of her bed. For a moment, her stomach churned as if she were a child again on her father's boat on the choppy waters of Tamir. The meager gruel she'd had hours previous threatened to exit her in a rather unfortunate manner, but she kept the feeling at bay.

The feelings were normal for a professional acrobat. Shula was no longer one, having left the entertainment life as a young adult, but she had made a concerted effort to retain her skills. Quelling motion sickness was simply a question of willpower. She could calm her stomach simply by focusing on her center, her core, and letting that stay her orientation. Then, all motion became external turbulance. When her world tilted the other direction suddenly, it was trivial to change her grip to adapt.

A loud thump interrupted her self-inflicted meditation. "Come out, little key..." a voice said. Shula thought to open her eyes and peer out from her cell, but to do so would mean removing herself from her sustained calm. The motion sickness would return.

The voice wasn't familiar to Shula, though during her imprisonment, only two had thusfar made visits with any kind of frequency. Bulus Naim, her jailer and master over the house she was kept in, had a deep, sonorous voice that shook the walls when he laughed. Daud, the servant man, sounded as if an irritating insect had permanently lodged itself inside his nostrils, limiting him to pained, nasal quips. This voice, however, was lilting and sing-song.

Like that of a naive child's.

"You won't find a key in here," Shula called, eyes still closed. A startled thud told her he hadn't expected her to be in here.

"Who said that?" he called, and Shula smiled. When the world spoke, you listened.

Despite the continued rocking of her cage, she chastised him loudly, "You're looking for a key in the larder, boy. Where is your sense?" The rocking slowed and stopped. He'd found her.

Shula opened her eyes, letting the world once more define up from down for her. Before her were the metal bars of her cage, arching upwards to a single point where a chain hung her from the ceiling. Beyond the metal bars appeared an enormous, puzzled face. Dark lines cut grooves around brown eyes, showing a wariness, but they were shallow still. He'd known hardship, but not much, and Shula noted that flecks of black covered his lids when he blinked. A Shaul, then.

"I can show you where he hides whatever you seek," Shula said, openly pleased with the circumstances. "But you'll want to hurry, Daud is quick-tempered and won't like a thief in his larder."

Still seemingly in shock, he didn't move. Instead, his mouth and eyes hung wide open. "A Jinni?" he queried, eyes narrowing. Shula laughed. Her? A Jinni? The boy was even more naive than she believed if he thought Jinn could be so easily captured as she was.

Still, it was an idea she could use. "Yes," she said with a wise nod. She waved her hands around in vague circles, miming a magical air about her. "A Jinni, boy, and a powerful one at that. I am only limited by Bulus to this... state. Take me with you, and I will help you succeed wildly!"

Prep for Get-Shit-Off-My-Chest dump.

To sum up my problems in one sentence: I'm lonely, insecure, a liar, and I pile responsibility onto myself to forget those facts. Now I'm going to rant and not make any sense.

I run several clubs at my college. I work very hard for my club members, hoping that some amount of return will appease the need to make people happy inside me. I want to see other people excited about stuff and thrive on stuff, and often times I don't give half a shit if I'm doing anything cool. I guess seeing other people happy makes me happy.

But doing cool things makes me happy, too. I set all these events up. I plan everything. I take all the burden onto myself, but it feels empty, half the time. It's not that I'm not participating, but I do all this work, and it doesn't seem like it's enough.

So I work harder. I get in contact with people. I throw my everything into my responsibilities. I barely sleep. I barely eat. I neglect the kinds of things that make life easy and simple because I'm afraid. The truth is that I'm absolutely terrified of living like a normal person. I'm terrified of entering into relationships because it means being myself, and I hate myself. I'm terrified of failing people who rely on me, too, so relationships seem impossible. I always wonder if I am being a bad friend. I always wonder if they are just "putting up with me". Maybe it's true, I think. There's no way to know. I have to make an assumption that they do or don't and that's it, but that's hard to keep up all the time when I so badly want to think that I'm hated. So I'm lonely.

And none of what I've said so far makes a lick of sense. I'm just shouting at a wall, hoping when my voice echoes back it doesn't sound like me. Or something. I dunno. I'm insecure.

And I lie. I lie to my friends, who I obviously doubt, and say I believe them when they say they like me and like hanging out with me. I lie to myself by thinking that if I just work a little harder, all these other things will go away. And I lie to strangers. I've been here before. I'm not that new. I just wanted a new start. I wanted things fresh.

Honestly, though, the biggest sense of guilt I feel is towards myself. I'm sorry, future me, if you ever re-read this. You should be taking it easy, and I've just made more work for you because I'm afraid you'll be something horrible. Hard work builds character, right? But none of it goes anywhere. You don't complete stories. You don't finish songs. You don't create anything that's finished and done and worth showing off, so I have you do something else, hoping that somewhere, something will finally satiate a desire I don't really understand.

I hope that maybe somewhere down the line, someone will tell me it's okay to slow down. Someone will stop and hold my head in their hands and beg for me to look at them and not at whatever work I'm doing. I'm lonely.

But anyway, here's something I worked on recently. It's not done and never will be, but here it is anyway: Living Off Snow-Cones At The Park

Feeling a fair bit better. Learning to breath. Drawing. I really like birds. I don't know why. I have an interview for a job as an RA at my university today, and I guess I have other stuff, but I'm ready for this. I'll come out okay, even if it takes a few tears every so often.

Some birds and stuff I doodled.

Do you ever get that issue where you have some stuff to say, so you open up the thing where you can say it, and then suddenly it's all not coming out right and it's stuck like this amorphous mass in your mind and mouth kludging up your eyes until finally you just explode?

That's probably just me.

Let's see. Word association to develop my thoughts. Here we go.

Depression. Apathy. Laziness. Unproductive. Youtube. Television. ADD. Siblings. Family. Homesickness. Lost.

And that's a good lead-off. I hate cross-roads. It's always a time when I'm sitting here going, "Well, how do I do x, y, and z?" and I just don't have any answers. Being an adult is hard too because you have to figure these things out or else you flounder and don't make any money and thus can't pay for food or a place to live, or you just end up living miserably.

And I don't know how to be an adult. I wish there were some kind of thing you could do to ease into it better, but a friend put college in a nice analogy to me. It's like, you're dangling from this rope. This rope is college. At some point, they're going to cut the rope from above you, and you're going to fall. The key is to grab another rope nearby before that so you have something to hold onto.

Of course, this requires finding a rope you can grab and having the person holding that rope let you grab it. Everyone is dangling, here. Everyone wants to hold the same rope as you, and by and large, it feels like most of them are far more ready to grab that rope than you. They'll survive when the rope goes. They'll be ready. Are you ready?

I'm not. I don't know how to get a real job. I don't know if I have the skills to do a real job in the real world even assuming I get some degree. There's no checklist, really. Sometimes it's nice and defined. "Be proficient with C/C++ coding" is something I can confirm. "Know codes and standards in circuit design" is something I don't know if I know. I might. I just don't know what that MEANS. Maybe it's one of those things that you'll know you know it if you know it, but you can't know that you know it unless you know it already. It's a weird semi-blind binary problem.

And of course, behind all of that is purpose. Some of us learn because we want to learn, but the truth for me is that I want to apply my knowledge with others in an environment. I excel in groups, bouncing ideas off of other people. I don't learn just to learn. I don't do just to do. I do because I want to communicate with others and know if what I'm doing is doable the way I'm doing it. How would they do it? Should I change my strategy? The purpose of doing is to refine the process of doing, I guess. The reason why I do anything never really is important.

If I don't have anyone to bounce off of, though, how do I feel like doing anything then? Apathy sets in, and that's the real killer. It kills my drive. It kills my mood. It makes me turtle and escape into unhealthy obsessions, and it's a demon I don't know how to tackle.

...

This is all very depressing, but it's necessary. The world isn't some bright, shiny sphere where everything is sunshine and smiles. John Keats said, "Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?"

We get by because it sucks. We're persevering creatures, designed to eke out a lonely existence in a world that wants us gone, and that's pretty damn cool.

I don't know where I'm going from here, but I know I'm going. Apathy may have killed my drive to do and loneliness may have stymied my drive to succeed, but that's only in a particular area. Time to change my goals and do again.

See you later.

5 AM. Locked out of my apartment. Need to sleep.

This is kind of a miserable way to be.

A post I made on /r/crossdressing on Reddit after my crazy Monday. It's kind of long. If you don't want to read it. You don't have to. It's just how I felt, my insecurities, my curiosities, and my satisfaction from that day.

i.imgur.com/pDkYOX7.jpg

So I posted a few days ago about being absolutely terrified of going out in the clothes pictured above. I'm a straight, Caucasian guy who likes to headbang to heavy metal music (I run a metal radio program) and write fiction sometimes, and I'll be honest, I'm pretty judgmental of people. I have friends who browse this subreddit, but as I said in my previous thread, I didn't think *I* could be interested in cross-dressing. It just wasn't something I felt like was appropriate for me to do.

And that's a little weird because my mother always taught me to respect other people's choices in sexual orientation and clothing choices and whatever they may like to be in their life. That's not my place to judge. I think it's really interesting that I have that cognitive dissonance. "It's okay that other people cross-dress, but I wouldn't do it," right?

Well, not so much.

I think I was born in the wrong era. If there's some future decade where metal is cool and women wear opera gloves and dresses everywhere, I should have been born then. I like girls in classy outfits, and when I looked in the mirror, I thought, "Man, I'm a little ugly, but I like the clothes. They're simple, soft, and delicate. They've got class. I don't really mind this."

Having the illusion of female anatomy wasn't hurting either.

But it was embarrassing at the time. I don't consider myself "good-looking" as a man, and I felt like I was a kid who found mommy's clothes and decided to dress up because his big sister thought it would be funny. I didn't feel like an adult making an adult decision. when I looked in the mirror again, I saw through the clothes and saw a guy beneath who wasn't sure why he was doing this. I saw a man who was afraid that he would be alienated by people he was friends with. I was afraid especially that women would judge me. "Oh, is that a man wearing women's clothes? He's infringing on our thing."

Which is ridiculous. The best responses I got the whole day were from women.

"I feel ridiculous," I'd say, "and I miss pockets something fierce."

"You're actually kind of good-looking," one woman said to me. "I've certainly seen frumpier girls. It really fits with how your face curves, and your hair works."

I'm not sure if they were just being nice or not, but back to what happened. So I was nervous all weekend. I was terrified. When I got up early on Monday, I was literally shaking so hard I felt like I was going to fall over. I left my apartment and the only thought going through my head was, "What the actual fuck are you doing?" This isn't something I'd been doing in secret for a while. This wasn't some female persona, and I felt like I was a bit of a poseur, honestly. There are people here, and friends of mine, who have developed themselves around cross-dressing. This is their thing, and here I was just "pretending for a day".

And though I'm sure that's not really the case, I'm sorry.

I spent my first lecture quietly. When the teacher (my psych prof for whom I was doing all of this originally) asked for interaction from the class, I didn't say a damn word for fear of people looking at me. I don't have the ability to change my voice to something more feminine. I'm rather jealous of people who can. My next class was where things started turning around. I went in and sat next to a friend, who looked at me and said, "Oh my god. I knew it would happen someday."

I'm not entirely sure if he was serious or not, but I ran with it. When he asked me why, I thought for a moment about how I'd respond and then said, "Why not?" I also explained that I had an assignment, but that I was doing way more for the assignment than was required because I wanted to. It was at this point a guy near me who was in my psych class turned and mentioned that I "had some serious balls." I shrugged. I still didn't feel brave. I felt like I was just pretending. Was that how I was supposed to feel? Did I want people to think I looked female? Did I want to identify myself as female? I don't know.

My professor came in and said a few things about the final exam next week. I gathered up my courage and just asked him about it. It was a smaller class, and I had already talked. People must have seen me. It didn't feel as intimitating. What struck me as really the most marvelous thing was that the professor simply answered my question like any other. He didn't look at me funny. He didn't ask. He just went on like nothing had happened. It was really a turning point. I consider myself good at reading people's faces, and I was really shocked that he didn't even seem to register that anything had changed.

After that, I went to spend lunch with some close friends. The obvious topic of conversation was me, and by this point, I was getting a little uncomfortable. I am very new to this. I had read a fair amount about stuffing bras, and I knew how they worked from taking more than a few off of an ex-girlfriend. It was getting itchy and uncomfortable. I'm told that underwire does that, and I openly told my friend that I felt bad for girls with large breasts. That really kind of sucked. I'm impressed that I worked a 38C, though. Really, I am.

And after that, the day was straight-forward. It stopped being about my insecurity and started being about being physically uncomfortable. I did fool a couple of people. One guy came into a room I frequent, and I said, "Hey, [name]."

He turned and said, "Who said that?" and I raised my hand, and this look of confusion crossed his face followed by one of registration. He told me, "I walked in and thought, 'Who is that girl? I don't know her,' and then I heard your voice, and I was like, 'Where is that coming from? Did I just miss him?' and then I realized."

But what really struck me as odd was one person I thought was friendly enough reacted very badly. I feel bad for anyone who has negative reactions to their choice to cross-dress because it can be really damaging. He didn't want me near him. He didn't want to talk to me. He openly told me, "I can't take you seriously in that." Had I been more like I was several months ago, I would have taken it to heart. If you're someone who runs into this, remember a saying from Benard Baruch (not Dr. Seuss, as it happens), "Those who matter don't mind, and those who mind don't matter."

At about 7 PM I got back to my apartment and shed my clothes and felt much more comfortable. My female friends also tell me this is pretty normal. "There's nothing better than coming home and letting your boobs breathe after a long day." Amen, sister.

And that was it. It was about a weekend of prep and anxiety followed by two hours of feeling afraid of people and then about ten hours of not caring and really wanting to ditch the bra.

I don't know if I really understand the appeal. I don't identify with a female persona. I still like the idea pretty dresses and opera gloves (I really loved all the girls at my high school prom), and if I could get my body into that form, I probably wouldn't mind seeing that in the mirror, but it's something I'd have to explore further when I have more time, and I think that having a significant other or close friends who are supportive is essential. I also don't know if I'm qualified now to offer advice and support to people trying to go out and about cross-dressed because most of you, I imagine, have been doing this for months or years, and you perfect this look. You know how you want to look. I still think I was just playing pretend girl for a day. If anyone has any advice for feeling like this for me and others, I'd be welcome to it.

And if it means anything at all, the world is becoming a better place, I think. People mostly ignored me if I didn't speak. When I did talk, many didn't think anything of it. The world still turned. People still answered questions I had, and the friends who I felt close to grew even closer. They're more open with me now, I think, as well. It's important to remember that there are people who care about you. You just have to reach out to the ones who do and ignore those react badly. We pass through this world rubbing a lens, and as we choose to do new things, that lens becomes clearer. You'll find out that people you saw one way, including yourself, are different afterwards, for better or worse, and it's important to know who is better because they'll be the ones to stick to.

And I encourage people who are afraid of going out looking however they choose to look to just do it. You won't be lynched. Hell, if you're ever in need of someone to help your through it, just ask. If someone said to me, "I'm afraid to do this alone. Will you help me out?" I'd drop what I was doing without even thinking about it. There's no need to be afraid of this. They're your clothes, and it's your life.

And if you have the courage to be who you really are or to even try and figure out who you really are, you're awesome. Keep it up. It gets better.

I'm having this issue where I can't figure out what words belong on the page. It's like there's a great big plug in my brain and it's made of commas and periods and semicolons and I just want to puke it all up. I dunno. Grammar seems like it's stopping up my creative kludge right now. I wrote something recently for a novel I wanted to write, but somehow, it just felt like words. It lacked substance. It lacked feeling. I couldn't sink myself into the submarine of my fiction because of all of these words.

It's even weird because I think about when I cut off paragraphs. It's this regular thing. If my paragraphs aren't as long as someone else's, they're inadequate.

It's like they aren't as good as someone else's paragraphs.

It's like I need to format everything the same way. Does that make it easier to read? I don't find anything easier to read. I skim and don't actually read every little word someone writes. Does that make me a bad person? Maybe you've actually written something really nice there, but I just wanted the content and didn't stop to appreciate how you wrote it.

And that's just part of the conflict. I have all this UGGGGHHH that doesn't want to fit into regular words. It's a big ball of emotion that doesn't splat onto a page because I found some words that are similar and kind of convey what I want. It builds up and I feel like I want to just burst, but at the same time, I want to practice art through poetry. You're constrained by the linguistic patterns of one language. English is what I know, but when I try to use it, the words feel hollow. Emotion is what I feel, but when I try to explain it, the words still feel hollow. You just can't win here.

And so I don't have a good answer. My words don't seem to last. I feel like stuff is unsaid, and I want to just lay in bed with someone watching old movies. Maybe I'm in love with someone I haven't met yet. I don't want to talk because I'm still busy loving them. When I'm heartbroken or ecstatic with them, then maybe I'll feel enough to write, but this weird in-between-moment is killing me.

I just talked to my dad about not knowing what to do with my college education. It's the same kind of problem. I'm in love with my field when I don't even KNOW my field. My field is my woman, and she's this beautiful, strange, mellifluent, unfathomable entity I haven't encountered yet. Not for realsies. I can't even dream about it because I can't imagine it.

And my dreams are weird because I'm so tense about it. I want more. I want to breathe in the scent of victory and exaltation and feel like my body isn't real, but instead I'm coiled like a spring before it leaps into the air. Like a slinky without a staircase. It leads to nightmares, and it sucks.

I want to be a flying spring. I want to be a slinky on an escalator moving at such a speed where I don't have to ever stop. It's a sad world when we have to wait to know our true place because the waiting is what kills us. I get depressed. I get bored. I hate that. It makes the little moments feel less real. Maybe boredom is really what deadens us to happiness and excitement and the feeling of loss and dread and anger, and so we need to feel all of those things ALL THE TIME so we don't have to lose our sense of realness.

Because right now I feel coiled and tense and dying. I want to leap upwards like a spring and feel angrier than I've ever felt before and yet more gleeful for it. I want to be able to convey the ideas swimming in my head without worrying how they look on a page. These are just letters. I am but muscle. How they move and how they communicate is important, but in the end, letters are letters, and they don't convey the big sweeping things I feel inside. My muscles don't reach you reading this now, but they understand the dives and rolls my inner self is doing.

And yet I'm not a dancer. I consider myself a writer, but I've lost control of my verbal marionettes. They won't dance with the vigor they once had. They won't leap from the floor like real people. Instead they move stiffly. What am I missing? What stops me from expressing these feelings of birds falling from the sky like stones and splattering their innards on the rocks below. What keeps them from flying as well, wings spread upon thermals and knowing what it means to see the curvature of the earth? Neither of these feel like things my words can do. Instead these words are like dead wood, useful only for consumption but neither glorious or intimidating or even pitiful. And yet I have to continue. There exists a hunger within me to keep my fingers moving across the keyboard and across the page with a pen and blah blah blah all day long whether anyone is listening or whether I use proper punctuation because I don't care. It's just a thing. It's just an internal compulsion that I don't understand. What do I do? What CAN I do but to keep writing even when the words feel empty and lost? When do I feel like they're worth something? Have they ever? Will my job feel like the one that I wanted today? Will my music feel like a completed piece of art? Will I say, "This is what I have always wanted from my career/music/writing and there is nothing that I want to change about it"?

I don't know.